by Lois Duncan
DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU was published in 1989, and I was writing it in 1988. I was finding it difficult to write, but I was doing it. I based the personality of April on my daughter Kaitlyn. In the book, I had April’s family get involved in a situation where they had too much knowledge about drug transactions, and April is chased by a hit man in a Camaro. A month after that book was published, our daughter Kait was chased down in her car and shot to death by a hit man in a Camaro.
Suddenly, everything I’d ever written about became hideous reality. Things kept popping up that had been written about as fiction in DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU and were now becoming parts of our everyday lives. We began getting death threats to the rest of our family and had to move out of our home and into an apartment with a security system. It wasn’t the Witness Security Program, but it certainly felt like it. We discovered that Kait had found out too much information about people involved in illegal activities, one of which was drug dealing, and was getting ready to blow the whistle on it. Each thing that was happening—it was like a rerun of details from the book.
Then a man was arrested for the shooting. He was not prosecuted, because there was not enough evidence, and he was let go, but his name was Mike and his nickname was Vamp. So there we have Mike Vamp, the name of the hit man in DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU. That is hardly a common name.
Barry: No, not at all.
Lois: What it felt like was that somehow in the process of writing that book, there was a mother’s instinct about wanting to protect her cub, which was one of the things that was making it hard for me to write. I was feeling danger to Kait coming closer and closer; it was like standing in the ocean with a tidal wave coming in, where you would feel the pull of the outgoing water before the wave formed and hit. As I was writing that book, I must somehow have been feeling the mental pull of a huge tidal wave that was going to hit our family. And as Idipped down into my imagination—the creative side of my brain—I must have dipped down too far and gotten precognition as well, pulling up details about what was actually going to happen in the future.
It’s a scary thing to think about, but there were too many instances of things in that book that later became part of our own true horror story for it to have been coincidence. It just couldn’t have been. It’s like I was getting little flashes of something that became part of our real life, and I was getting them just ahead of time.
Barry: Thank you, Lois. Let’s switch gears and talk about your casual treatment of underage drinking and marijuana use. You don’t make a big deal about it. It’s just something the kids are doing. At the time that the books were originally published, how was that received?
Lois: It was received very badly by a number of people who thought that if you mention something in a book, you’re encouraging young people to do it. I would never want to encourage young people to do drugs or to drink, but they’re doing it anyway, and it’s very hard to write a contemporary book that ignores that fact. I could not very well have my kids going to aparty where the parents are out of town and throw this big bash and have them all sitting around drinking soda pop and playing charades. It’s just… I couldn’t! It wouldn’t be realistic!
There’s exactly that sort of party in DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU, and the book was banned in certain places because of “sex and teenage drinking.” Personally, I find that ridiculous. The only sex in that book was one moment of teenage groping that offended the heroine so much that she immediately went home. And the “drinking” consisted of some spiked punch at one party.
Barry: That segues really nicely into what I wanted to talk about next, which is self-censorship, both then and now. In terms of artistic freedom, did you ever censor yourself? Were you ever asked by an editor to tone something down because it just didn’t fit the sensibilities of the day?
Lois: Oh, I definitely was. In the first book I ever wrote, which was published in the 1950s, I had a renegade boy of nineteen drink a beer. That book was returned to me immediately by an editor who said, “We could never let a young person imbibe alcohol in one of our novels. No librarian would ever put this book on the shelf and no parent would let a child read it.” So I changed the beer to a soft drink and the book won the Seventeenth Summer Literary Award and launched my career. So I had to be very, very careful.
In another book I wrote back then, I had a brother and sister who were running away from bad guys. I think the boy was fourteen and she was sixteen. They were traveling across the country on buses. They stop somewhere and rent a motel room. They go in and they crash on the twin beds because they’re exhausted. That got returned to me because I had two people of opposite sexes sharing a bedroom.
Barry: Even though they’re brother and sister?
Lois: Brother and sister. They have their clothes on, they fall onto the beds, they sleep for a couple of hours, they look out the window—there’s the bad guy. Away they go. This “troublesome” scene had to be removed. The editor told me, “They’ll have to rent separate motel rooms.” I said, “They can’t rent separate rooms, because they don’t have any money.” So I was told to create an L-shaped alcove so the boy could nap on the bed out of sight of his sister, and that way maybe we could get by with that terrible scene.
Barry: Oh my god.
Lois: Did you just say “Oh my god,” Barry?
Barry: Yeah.
Lois: Now that would’ve been knocked out of the book so fast!
Barry Lyga is the author of several novels for teens, including the acclaimed The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl, its sequel, Goth Girl Rising, and the award-winning Boy Toy. He is also the author of the upcoming thriller series I Hunt Killers, about the son of a notorious serial killer who must use the skills taught to him by his father to track down a murderer.
READER DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
By Lois Duncan
Prepared by Jeremy Cesarec
1. Until April was called out of class, she didn’t know how much trouble her dad was mixed up in. Do you ever wonder if your parents are hiding secrets from you?
2. Is April’s life back home really as perfect as she makes it sound? Explain.
3. Lorelei and April’s mom are very different. Do you know people who are very different from their parents? In what ways are you different from your parents?
4. When April listened in on Max’s call to Jim about the threatening letter her dad received, she decided not to tell her mom. Did she do the right thing? Why or why not?
5. April complains that her family’s time at the hotel with Jim is boring. What would you do if you were stuck in that situation? Would you be bored watching TV all day, with no friends to talk to?
6. Since she was quite happy with her old life, April is reluctant to start a new life in the Witness Security Program. Other people might find it exciting to start with a clean slate. Have you ever fantasized about starting fresh in a place where no one knows you? If you could reinvent yourself, what would you change? Where would you move?
7. If one of your friends disappeared without warning with her entire family, what would you do?
8. When Larry first invites April to the movies, she’s worried about being faithful to Steve and doesn’t want to go on a date. Later she finds out that Steve hasn’t waited for her. Taking the situation into account, would you wait for April if you were in Steve’s shoes? How long could you wait without even knowing what happened to her?
9. April really loves playing tennis, and her skill is a big part of her self-image, so she takes it hard when she finds out she can’t play on the team. What interests, hobbies and talents do you think define you as a person? What would you be unwilling to give up in a similar situation? Are there certain things that are so important you could never sacrifice them?
10. When April presses her dad for the reason he put the family in danger, he says, “The real truth is, I wanted to be a hero” (p. 120). He explains that he’s never felt important in his life, and this was his big chance. Do most people want a chan
ce to be heroes at least once in their lives? Why or why not?
11. At the end of the book, April seems to come to terms with her new life. What would you miss most if you had to start over? Who would you most want to be able to see again?
For a complete Reader’s Guide, visit www.lb-teens.com.
LOIS DUNCAN
Lois Duncan is the author of over fifty books, ranging from children’s picture books to poetry to adult non-fiction, but is best known for her young adult suspense novels, which have received Young Readers Awards in sixteen states and three foreign countries. In 1992, Lois was presented the Margaret A. Edwards Award by the School Library Journal and the ALA Young Adult Library Services Association for “a distinguished body of adolescent literature.” In 2009, she received the St. Katharine Drexel Award, given by the Catholic Library Association “to recognize an outstanding contribution by an individual to the growth of high school and young adult librarianship and literature.”
Lois was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sarasota, Florida. She knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a writer. She submitted her first story to a magazine at age ten and became published at thirteen. Throughout her high school years she wrote regularly for young people’s publications, particularly Seventeen.
As an adult, Lois moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she taught magazine writing for the Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico and continued to write for magazines. Over three hundred of her articles and stories appeared in such publications as Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Reader’s Digest, and for many years she was a contributing editor for Woman’s Day.
Six of her novels—SUMMER OF FEAR, KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, GALLOWS HILL, RANSOM, DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU and STRANGER WITH MY FACE—were made-for-TV movies. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and HOTEL FOR DOGS were box office hits.
Although young people are most familiar with Lois Duncan’s fictional suspense novels, adults may know her best as the author of WHO KILLED MY DAUGHTER?, the true story of the murder of Kaitlyn Arquette, the youngest of Lois’ children. Kait’s heartbreaking story has been featured on such TV shows as Unsolved Mysteries, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, Sally Jessy Raphael and Inside Edition. A full account of the family’s ongoing personal investigation of this still-unsolved homicide can be found on the Internet at http://kaitarquette.arquettes.com.
Lois and her husband, Don Arquette, currently live in Sarasota, Florida. They are the parents of five children.
You can visit Lois at http://loisduncan.arquettes.com.
Table of Contents
Front Cover Page
Welcome Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Q&A with the Author
Reader Discussion Question
Lois Duncan
Copyright
Copyright
Also by Lois Duncan:
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER
KILLING MR. GRIFFIN
Copyright © 1989 by Lois Duncan
Reader Discussion Questions and Author Q&A copyright © 2010 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: September 2010
First published in May 1989 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-17982-9
